Flow Controls inside Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
How to lead your audience through different paths in a journey
In today’s article about Journey Builder, we will explain the activity part called “Flow Controls”. In short, they will help you make decisions in your journey and create different paths for your audience that enters the journey.
Inside Journey Builder, right under message activities, you will find “Flow controls”. Now, let’s go through the different types and what they can do:
- Wait activities – These will help you to define when the message should be delivered. In total, you have three types of wait activities; “Wait by duration”, “Wait by attribute” and “Wait until date”. They will help you specify when the next message should be delivered. You can customize the duration from minutes to years or by date. In this way, you can make sure you neither spam your customers or let them wait for too long.
- Splits – These will help you to create an activity inside the journey based on your customers interaction and attributes. Choose between “Decision split”, Random split” and “Engagement Split”. For example, choose to send the next message to only a specific segment, like females within certain age or preferences. You can add several attributes in the “Filter Criteria”. Furthermore, choose what type of message your customers should receive, if that should be an email or a sms message. To sum up, a decision split works as a criteria how your customers should move on in the journey. The ones that do not meet any of the criteria, they will simply exit the journey.
- Join activity – Here you can bring customers from two or more paths into a single one.
- Einstein splits – Einstein makes predictions of the behaviour of your audience inside Marketing Cloud. With Einstein splits you get different criteria with predictive data to split your journey. For instance, you can split the paths between different persona types or channel preferences. Additionally, you can optimise the time of your send.
Drag-and-drop these wait activities onto the Journey Builder canvas. Then, configure each control by clicking on each icon.
Customer success story – Brunello Cucinelli
Brunello Cucinelli wanted to give their online shoppers exclusive experience and was looking for a partner that would share the same values. Finally, with Salesforce, they were able to build customer journeys that provided their customer with an experience as close to their expectations and desires.
Other types of activities
Read more about different types of activities in a customer journey. Also, check out what templates are have available that can help you with creating your first journey.